This study extends the extant literature on executive pay dispersion by exploring the cultural-cognitive social determinants. We investigate how religious institutional environments, including Buddhism- and Confucianism-based institutions, shape vertical executive pay dispersion. We theorize that a Buddhism-based institutional environment is negatively related to vertical executive pay dispersion. In contrast, we propose competing hypotheses regarding how a Confucianism-based institutional environment affects vertical executive pay dispersion. With a sample of Chinese public firms, we find that both Buddhism- and Confucianism-based institutional environments are negatively associated with a firm's vertical executive pay dispersion. Supplementary analyses show that the aforementioned main effects are attenuated when a firm is embedded by a communist party branch and has a younger CEO.

The institutional logics perspective provides a powerful theory that emphasizes how symbolic beliefs and material practices are intertwined in relatively enduring configurations that can profoundly shape behavior across space and time. In this article, we build upon the arguments and insights of Haveman, Joseph-Goteiner, and Li, suggesting the need for a broader research agenda on the dynamics of institutional logics in China and around the world. Building on some of our recent writings, we argue for the need to go beyond the study of how logics have effects, to understand how logics themselves cohere, endure, and co-evolve in dynamic interrelationships with other logics.

This study examines corporate philanthropy in the context of corporate wrongdoing punishment in emerging markets. Building on institutional theory, we propose that in emerging markets, after being punished for fraudulent behavior by the government, which is collectively the largest institution, convicted firms tend to use corporate philanthropy as an institutional strategy to regain legitimacy. Using data of Chinese-listed firms that were punished for financial fraud in the ten years from 2004 to 2013, our findings show the subsequent growth of corporate philanthropy to be positively related to punishment severity. Furthermore, convicted firms’ media visibility, dominant state ownership, and national political appointment strengthen the effect of punishment severity on corporate philanthropy increase. Our institutional perspective offers new insights into why firms engage in corporate philanthropy after fraud punishment.

Our understanding of how an organisation operates is elucidated by the host country's political system. Myanmar has remained abstruse to researchers for many decades, as do most emerging markets prior to their transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy such as China. We establish how the problematising and contextualisation of the methodologies adopted during longitudinal fieldwork in Myanmar (2008 to 2016) has influenced our research focus and question. By reflecting on our experience of conducting organisational research in a highly institutionalised environment, we have identified limitations in the prevalent research methodologies used by the extant literature. Such methodologies tend to be incompatible with the Asian context. This process of problematisation required us to remain flexible and adaptive during the process of the generation of the research questions. We adopted a context-informed theory-building process and reflect on the interplay between interviewer, interviewees, and local institutional contexts. An important insight from this process was the need to nullify the asymmetry of power between the interviewer and interviewees to obtain honest responses rather than superficial data that aimed to satisfy and please the interviewer/institutional context.

We examine the mechanisms through which firm capabilities moderate the impact of institutional forces upon firms’ adoption of environmental management strategy (EMS). Viewing the limitations of the institutional perspective in explaining the heterogeneity in firms’ EMS, we suggest that an important source of variation is the idiosyncratic capabilities of the firm in acquiring and allocating resources. Based on the strategic response theme of institutional theory and the resource-based view, we argue that the influence of institutional forces on EMS is contingent on the presence of environmental orientation and innovation capability. Using data collected from China, we test these notions. Our empirical results suggest that both environmental orientation and innovation capability positively moderate the effect of institutional forces on firm's EMS. By demonstrating how institutional forces and firm capabilities interact with each other, we enhance our understanding of how firms succeed in developing EMS.

Meso-institutions are weak, intermediate forms of institutions that bridge the gap between institutional disintegration and the development of new, more firmly established institutions. Meso-institutions lack the stronger behaviour-guiding signs and symbols of more established institutions, but instead contain fragments of former institutions mixed with emerging, but fragile, components of developing institutions. Institutional disintegration leads to a disorienting period characterized by the dissolution of fundamental, widely held ideologies. This offers an opportunity for actions rather than institutions to guide actions. Because meso-institutions are weak, only after actions are repeated will they solidify into specific patterns that may be retrospectively granted legitimacy. Using archival data supplemented by interviews, we identified three meso-institutional occurrences with the phenomenologically based manifestations of fractured ideology, actions as rules and retrospective legitimization.

Prior research has suggested a number of potential benefits to firm membership in business groups. These benefits include availability of capital and other resources not readily accessible in an open market, the facilitation of entrepreneurship, plus information and risk sharing advantages. We suggest that another important benefit is the assistance of group control systems in helping the firm to manage conflicting pressures in the institutional environment and facilitate coevolution of these conflicting pressures. To empirically demonstrate the relevance of this viewpoint, we examine the case of China where business groups facilitate institutional transition, actively balancing market pressures to increase levels of innovativeness in firms with institutional pressures emanating from the government to maintain high employment levels. Using data from a broad sample of more than 1,000 Chinese affiliate firms in more than 200 business groups, we find that government policy, ownership and managerial mindset influence the political goal of maintaining high employment levels, while interdependence among group affiliate firms is related to lower employment levels. However, while government ownership and the government managerial mindset were negatively related to market innovation activities, group financial and cultural control systems positively affected the tendency of affiliate firms to focus on market innovation.